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Ubuntu 64-bit More Competitive Against Mac OS X

Phoronix: Ubuntu 64-bit More Competitive Against Mac OS X

Last week we published Ubuntu 9.04 vs. Mac OS X 10.5.6 benchmarks where we compared the performance of these two popular operating systems on a Mac Mini. With the OS X kernel currently being 32-bit but with support for 64-bit applications, we had used the 32-bit version of Ubuntu 9.04. In a majority of the Leopard operating system from Apple outperformed Canonical's Jaunty Jackalope, but today we are adding in the results from an Ubuntu 64-bit installation. As you can see from the results, the x86_64 version of Ubuntu Linux is more competitive against Mac OS X 10.5.6.

About this 'regression' fixed in 2.6.29. Regression is probably in GCC or in some library (maybe this also explains why *BSD and Open Solaris aren't performance monsters in PB) and there's only workaround in 2.6.29. If there was regression in Linux kernel many people will complain about it and Linux devs test kernel themselves. If there's even only 2% performance drop they take care of this.

I think if the graphics and SQLite performance were fixed then there really wouldn't be much of a performance gap for most desktop users to care about.

There isn't any gap in SQLite. If you switch to Ext 4 you should see a huge improvement in this test. In real world benchmarks OS X doesn't have a chance with any of Big Three (Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris). An only area where OS X is better is graphics, but probably only when you don't use binary blobs on Linux (however 2D performance should still be better on OS X).

The major difference (which these benchs show) is the use of SSE by default in x86_64, which is way faster than x87 floating point unit.

Actually, 64-bit code even uses SSE2 as all x86_64 CPUs are SSE2 capable. To test your theory, one could compare a source based distro (eg. Gentoo) which was compiled with such optimization against a non-optimized distro.

That being said, encryption and video encoding tests also benefit from the additional x86_64 registers, so I expect that 32 bit code will still perform worse.